Patriotic gore

But if you are repulsed by Fussell's sentences then you have to believe that young Americans with insufficient training and no experience of combat, put in the position of watching their buddies being blown to pieces or slowly and agonizingly dying from wounds that could not be mended, should properly have been high-minded enough to remember that they were engaged in the cause of destroying fascism instead of just trying to stay alive. For a historian like Schama to hold such a view means abjuring the hard truth of experience in favor of the wishful thinking of propaganda.

The sentence that I believe may get Fussell into trouble in "The Boys' Crusade" comes at the back of the book in the "Suggestions for Further Reading" section. "The troops' memoirs in my listing of sources will be found rewarding, especially to readers interested in exploring the fact that what has been celebrated as the Greatest Generation included among the troops and their officers, plenty of criminals, psychopaths, cowards and dolts." The objectors to that sentence will, I imagine, perceive it as an insult to the troops instead of the inevitable truth. How could it be otherwise in a conscript army needing sheer manpower to win a war that, as Dwight Eisenhower recognized, could not be won by air power alone? Furthermore it is not some antimilitary polemicist who has made those observations about the less than honorable behavior of some of the soldiers and officers -- but a comrade of those men.

If we lived in a world less susceptible to the redemptive narratives of war, it would not be necessary to point out that nowhere in any of his writings does Fussell ever say or imply that World War II did not need to be fought, or that the men who fought it don't deserve our eternal gratitude. To have saved the world from fascism, Fussell knows, is to have fought for the very concept of what it means to be human. But, refusing the reader easy comfort, Fussell reminds us that that goal had to be achieved by inhuman means. No contemporary American writer has done more to explain, understand, and thus to honor the experience of Americans in combat, and by honor I mean paying his comrades the respect of faithfully recording what they saw, did and felt.

Just as it falsifies the victims of Sept. 11, 2001, to turn them into combatants who died in the name of freedom (they were civilians murdered as they went about their lives), it falsifies the experience of the soldiers in World War II to deny the terror, deprivation and filth they lived in. Fussell never denies that heroism is possible in battle. But heroism for him means something more complex than the simple-minded rhetoric of giving your life for your country. It can mean something as simple as holding on to your humanity in an inhumane predicament or providing the sort of leadership that imparts a feeling of confidence in the men under you. Or it can mean something as noble as putting yourself in danger to save the lives of your comrades.

Fussell does not single out for scorn the men who cannot be called heroes simply because they reacted as human beings with fear or paralysis. It's the reckless, the cowardly, the ones who blithely sacrifice the lives of others (as opposed to the officers who are sometimes in the terrible position of having to issue orders they know will result in the deaths of their men) who deserve scorn. One of the war memoirists whom Fussell most admires, Eugene B. Sledge, a Marine who fought at Peleliu and Okinawa, two of the worst battles of the war, writes memorably about the false rhetoric of heroism. On Peleliu, Sledge and a buddy were sent into a gun pit where two Marines had been attacked the night before. The blood of those men still stains the coral rock. Sledge writes, "As I looked at the stains on the coral, I recalled some of the eloquent phrases of politicians and newsmen about how 'gallant' it is for a man to 'shed his blood for his country,' and 'to give his life's blood as a sacrifice,' and so on. The words seemed so ridiculous. Only the flies benefited."

It's a measure of how much phrases like those have penetrated into our conception of war that Fussell needs to remind us that American soldiers were not Robert Taylor in "Bataan" or John Wayne in "The Sands of Iwo Jima." The soldiers who fought the land war in Europe were, Fussell writes, "largely ... American boys 17, 18 and 19 years old." Seventeen-year-olds could enlist with their parents' permission, though many of that age used false papers "not rigorously inquired into." (The same is likely true of those who fought in the Pacific.) Though the infantry composed only 14 percent of the total number of Americans the Army sent overseas, Fussell quotes historian Roger Spiller that it suffered "more than 70 percent of all battle casualties among overseas troops."

"The Boys' Crusade" goes on to lay out the intensity and viciousness of the fighting that led to such high casualties among such a comparatively small number. But, sticking to his determination to faithfully record experience, Fussell does not shy away from the facts that a number of those casualties were the result of the screw-ups on our side. Some of those are plain dumb oversight, like the failure of the army to provide the troops in the Hurtgen Forest with dry socks and boots, leading to trench foot and, in many cases, amputation.

Some episodes display such a lack of basic common sense that they exemplify the source of the black comedy from which Joseph Heller's "Catch-22" sprung. Of these none seems more of a fuck-up than the COBRA operation. The aim was to eliminate the hedgerows that made Allied advance through occupied France so slow and so dangerous. Gen. Omar Bradley came up with the idea of using fighter-bombers to fly along a six-kilometer stretch of road close to German positions and bomb two kilometers on either side of it. In the first two days, 136 American troops were killed by "friendly fire" and nearly 500 were wounded. COBRA proved devastating to the German troops in the area. But no one had accounted for the way that the heavy cloud of dust and smoke stirred up by the bombings would drift back to obscure the American troops and thus make them vulnerable to attack from the air by their own forces. The Associated Press published a photo of American soldiers being dug out of ruined foxholes, claiming they were victims of German shelling. Fussell concludes his narrative of COBRA with these typically terse lines embodying his disgust for the official view of war: "Tourists prowling around the COBRA area should not waste time looking for a memorial to the boys killed by the bombing error. There is none."

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